Our school district recently hosted a book club discussion on “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, and it was an eye-opening experience for me and many other parents. The book dives deep into how smartphones and social media have significantly impacted the mental health of today’s teens and tweens.
Haidt presents four key proposals to address this crisis:
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Delay smartphones until high school (allowing “dumb phones” or smartwatches instead)
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Implement phone-free school environments
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Restrict social media use until age 16
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Encourage more free play to build responsibility and independence
Here are some of my favorite quotes grouped by category
Social Media
While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex-essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation-is not up to full capacity until the mid 20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation
A fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge.
the four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood that damage boys and girls of all ages: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
Social media therefore harmed the social lives even of students who stayed away from it. (My added context: students felt left out if they weren’t on a social media app)
Compared with boys, when girls go onto social media, they are subjected to more severe and constant judgments about their looks and their bodies, and they’re confronted with beauty standards that are further out of reach.
Free play
Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.
A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day. Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates elementary school students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school. It’s not homework that gets them ready, nor is it classes on handling their emotions. Such adult-led lessons may provide useful information, but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does.
Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.
The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious.
Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth
Maturity
If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, the activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding.
Natural sleep patterns shift during puberty. Teens start to go to bed later, but because their weekday mornings are dictated by school start times, they can’t sleep later. Rather, most teens just get less sleep than their brains and bodies need. This is a shame because sleep is vital for good performance in school and life, particularly during puberty, when the brain is rewiring itself even faster than it did in the years before puberty.
Friendships
All know that they will be chosen or passed over based in part on their appearance. But for adolescent girls, the stakes are higher because a girl’s social standing is usually more closely tied to her beauty and sex appeal than is the case for boys.
The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”
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